The Coveted Recipe

Book excerpt: The Coveted Recipe may be a part of that story, only steeped in the Dark Ages. I am not sure what it is and where it belongs. Is it an adult fairy tale? A sad tragedy of times past? Or a parable of human nature that in changing remains the same, where innocent people are caught in webs of misplaced fears, laws, and regulations? It came to me on a sunny day in Berlin as I sat in an U-Bahn that passed along the broken graffiti-smeared Berlin Wall, thinking how it had locked people in—like the Iron Curtain—and how many suffered and died behind those walls that had cut through lives and loves, leaving trails of guilt and sin on all sides. And then I thought about punishments, such as witch hunts and dungeons and prisons and wars. Seeing the devastation through a foggy window, I hoped that the train was speeding into a new and better age . . .